CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
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Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
All-American Road. Lake Superior, waterfalls, forest. A one-way ride of 258 km, Duluth to the finish - roughly 3 h 39 in the saddle. The stops in between: Two Harbors, Silver Bay, North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota and Grand Marais. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For 30 km this is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Duluth is built on a hillside so steep that the streets look as if they were drawn by someone who had never seen a slope. The city climbs from the western tip of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world by area, up a long ridge that gives a view of the harbour, the ore docks and the gleaming water from nearly every neighbourhood. At the foot of the hill, in Canal Park, the Aerial Lift Bridge rises to let ocean-going freighters pass in and out of the harbour, and the sound of its horn is as much a part of the city as the gulls. Tourists crowd the pier to watch the ships come in, some of them a thousand feet long.
Read the complete Duluth write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 1 sits at 0 km, early in the day. Next is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 2.
Two Harbors exists because of iron. When the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota proved to hold some of the richest ore deposits in the world, the mining companies needed a way to get it to the steel mills of the lower Great Lakes, and a railway from the mines to Agate Bay on Lake Superior, completed in the 1880s, made the little port the first ore-shipping harbour in the state. The huge ore docks still stand on the waterfront, long black steel structures from which the red ore was loaded into the holds of lake freighters, and you can watch the great ships come and go. The town has about three and a half thousand people and is the first real stop on the North Shore after Duluth, which lies roughly forty kilometres south-west.
Read the complete Two Harbors write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 2 comes up 49 km in. Next is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 3.
98 km in you reach North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 3. Next is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 4.
North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 4, about halfway. Next is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 5.
Grand Marais is where the road runs out of tame country. The little harbour town, tucked into a natural bay on the Lake Superior shore with the pine-covered hills behind it, is the end of the North Shore Scenic Drive for most visitors, and it feels like an outpost, a place that has made peace with long winters and short summers. The name is French, and means great marsh, though no marsh is evident, and the town was first a fur-trading and fishing post. The population is about thirteen hundred, but in July it is full of tourists, painters, canoeists and walkers, all drawn by the wild country to the north.
Read the complete Grand Marais write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 5 sits at 196 km, late in the day. Next is North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 6.
North Shore Scenic Drive Minnesota point 6 comes up 258 km in.